Today began a bit cloudy and cold, low 40's, so we slept in...all the way to 8 AM. After a slow breakfast, we headed up the Akokala Creek Trail towards Akokala Lake and Akokala Creek. It was the first really uphill hike we had taken in a while. Akokala Lake is 800' above Bowman Lake, but the trail goes over a couple of ridges on the way to Akokala Creek.
The route starts by going up 800' to 4800' in the first 1.8 miles. At this point we met a group of about ten young hikers who had overnighted at Akokala Lake's backcountry campground. They'd been on the trail for about two hours, so we esimated that it would be three more for us to go all the way to the lake, but only about 20 minutes for them to go downhill to the campground.
We then dropped down a couple of hundred feet and back up to 4900' in the next mile. At this point there were views to the mountains to the north, ones we'd not seen before. Finally it was downhill 550' to the creek through a large open area that had been burned over several years ago, where we had lunch by yet another ultra-clear rushing mountain stream. The trail is not heavily used and quite narrow and bushy through a fair amount of it and it looked like more of the same as it then followed the creek up-river to the lake...so we didn't.
We were over two hours out and had come over 3.5 miles so we figured the creek was a good turn-around spot and headed back—uphill, of course. We retraced those ups and downs, saw no other hikers and no bears. Actually, we saw little more than trees, bushes and a few black squirrels through most of the hike. We popped back out at the campground about two hours later and after a 7.2 mile walk in the woods, 1650' of it, uphill...and 1650' of it, downhill.
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